Where Have All the Short Works of Literature Gone?

The last time I walked into a chain bookstore, I searched the shelves for short story collections, novellas, poetry, one-act plays. And I naturally found almost nothing. Going to a chain bookstore is an exercise in frustration for the reader looking for shorter works of literature. Anthologies of American short stories—with the same pieces by Poe, Hawthorne, Hemingway, and Faulkner—abound. Other common items are anthologies of “the greatest poems of the English language” (none of which seem to agree—one anthology will have T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” another will offer “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” a third will present “The Hollow Men”). And one-act plays—unless the reader happens to have an unending love affair for Neil Simon—are harder yet to find. Novellas are at the bottom of the totem pole. Too long to be a short story, not quite long enough to be a novel. It seems that the only way to publish a novella is to have a name (like Ian McEwan or Philip Roth) and to have your publisher dress up the novella like a novel; McEwan’s On Chesil Beach and Roth’s Everyman—despite what their covers say—are really novellas in disguise. Both weigh in at about 200 pages, but the large font size and the wide margins indicate that somebody in the design department wanted these things to look like novels.

Even anthologies such as The Best American series provide, at best, a glimpse of short literature. Everything else—the collections by one author, for instance—are picked up by university presses. Granted, I’m happy that university presses are picking up the slack, but Barnes & Noble and Waldenbooks are not in the practice of keeping their shelves stocked with the latest publications from the University of Michigan Press or the Susquehanna University press or anywhere else, for that matter. I am convinced that there are lots of great stories, great poems, great plays, and great novellas/short novels out there. But nobody can get them because the chain bookstores are selling the “big” things and—as a post from last week argues—mixes in literature with everything else, anyway.

And even getting a short work out in the first place is difficult. In the novella course this semester, I noticed immediately that all of the novellas we read in class were part of some other collection. Then Steve Yarbrough, one of the visiting novelists, pointed out that in European countries, a person can go into a bookstore and find novellas, printed by themselves. (Granted, this is obviously hearsay because I’m taking his word for it, but I don’t doubt that America and Europe have different literary cultures. That he is married to the Polish literary translator Ewa Hryniewicz-Yarbrough and spends several months of each year in Krakow only makes his claim more reputable.) I don’t think this problem ends just with literature, either. People will purchase seasons of television shows and movies, but when did you last hear common people—not just film nuts—talk about short films?

And the same is true of short stories and essays and poems. Who talks about them, aside from story writers and essayists and poets? Stephen King, in his introduction to The Best American Short Stories 2007 concludes that the American short story was alive, but not well. I can hardly wonder why.

Last weekend I went to D.J. Ernst Used Bookstore in Selinsgrove, where I purchased a copy of Iris Murdoch’s “Something Special.” Yes, this is not a typo—“Something Special” is a single short story. Fifty-one wonderful pages, written in Murdoch’s smart, thoughtful, and crisp prose, this single story was published by W.W. Norton in November 2000, almost a year-and-a-half after Murdoch’s death. It was a rare pleasure to find a single story, published in hardcover by a major house. I read it the other night, and reading this book reminded me of the joy in sitting down to read something short, brilliant, and slight. And because of this, I have to wonder how Americans can meet fantastic literature. Our bookstores are not selling gems like Murdoch’s “Something Special.” And that’s something that I find terribly unsettling.

Possession, or the Biographer’s Temptation

Unfortunately, we needed Madonna to tell us that “[w]e all live in a material world.” Our possessions confer status upon us, just as our actions and proclivities do. Some scholars pursue the foci of their research with rabid ferocity, scrounging through dusty volumes for any link, any insight, that could bastion their authority. What better possession to have than the authoritative account of an influencer’s life? Less scrupulous scholars can construct—on the surface—an innocuous narrative studded with the biographer’s own personal agenda. British novelist A.S. Byatt gives us reason enough to fear this possibility.

 

A.S. Byatt’s novel Possession, winner of England’s 1990 Booker Prize, follows the discovery of letters between two (fictional) Victorian poets, Randolph Henry Ash and Christabel LaMotte. Mortimer Cropper, an Ash scholar and the novel’s antagonist, has transmogrified the poets into mere relics, possessions that are meant to be stored behind glass in Cropper’s Stant Collection at Robert Dale Owen University (also fictional). Cropper has written a biography of Ash entitled The Great Ventriloquist, which chronicles Cropper’s pursuits as much as it chronicles Ash’s life. Cropper, in writing about Ash’s Yorkshire venture, notes that Ash carried an ash plant, a metaphorical extension of the poet. Cropper laments, “It is a matter of regret to me that I have never been able to procure an authenticated exemplar of this Wotanstave for the Stant Collection.” Cropper continuously weaves his own experiences with his account on Ash.

 

Recent book reviews in the New York Times suggest that a biographer’s self-sycophantic appropriations of a subject are not limited to Byatt’s postmodern novel. In a review of A. David Moody’s biography of Ezra Pound, Charles McGrath lambasts Moody’s pedantism: “Moody is more concerned with cramming in information than with fashioning a narrative….He has little gift for characterization, so that the key people in Pound’s life…flit through these pages like disembodied presences, sometimes introduced in footnotes or sometimes not at all.” Moody uses his education to give us his Ezra Pound and tell us what his Ezra Pound means to us: “He knows more about Pound’s poetry than probably anyone else alive….” Biography allows obsessing scholars to possess their favorite authors, a temptation, indeed. And then the biographer and the subject are irrevocably linked, as suggested in Dan Chiasson’s review of Mark Scroggins’ biography about Louis Zukofsky: The biography “never strays far from Zukofsky the poet.” But Chiasson later writes, “A poet needs a myth of origin.” Here is the postmodern irony: the poets’ lives constitute the myth’s foundations, but the biographer refurbishes the legend. But knowledge should not eclipse the biography’s subject, freezing it into a still life like Mortimer Cropper’s depiction of Ash.

 

I have couched my arguments in a skepticism learned from Byatt’s provocative novel, but I believe that Byatt has asked us to doubt the biographers’ intentions. A.S. Byatt quotes Edmund Gosse (an actual Victorian author and critic) in Mortimer Cropper’s Ash biography when describing the destruction that befell the Yorkshire rock-basins: “An army of ‘collectors’ has passed over them, and ravaged every corner of them.” I fear that an army of collectors has launched a similar assault on the life stories of our greatest writers. We may live in Madonna’s material world, but our greatest literary minds are not dusty knickknacks.